Along with my involvement with Synapse, the other pivotal encounter of my video life was meeting Red Burns in early 1974 at her Alternate Media Center office. I was looking for summer work and I was directed to Red by a colleague from my (past) summer video job at the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs. Red saw past my technical name-dropping (or should I say jargon-dropping) and offered me a job as her porta-pak assistant for the August class she was teaching at NYU. But most importantly she sent me to intern for her protege-colleague Bobby Maraino who was running Manhattan Cable’s Public Access Dept. I luckily went from intern to staff in short order. That job and the friends I met there would change my life. Things would come full circle in the 90’s when my circle of younger friends from the original dot-com crowd were mostly products of her ITP-NYU graduate school. Red is the living bridge between the (analog) Radical Software era of the 70s and its digital fulfillment in the 90s. Thanks Red!

This bit for introduction from an NYU web page…

During the 1970’s, as head of NYU’s Alternate Media Center, she designed and directed a series of telecommunications projects including two-way television for and by senior citizens, telecommunications applications to serve the developmentally disabled, and one of the first Teletext field trials in the United States (at WETA in Washington, D.C.). This innovative research center set the stage for the creation of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU in 1979.

2 Responses to Red Burns

Paul: It was great to run into you – it makes me happy to see that everything changes and nothing changes — you make me smile and proud of our early mistakes and triumphs -= my best to each of your band of angels – with much affection RED